From the comments:
Please accept these comments on behalf of Earthworks, a national non-profit organization that protects communities and the environment from the impacts of energy development while seeking sustainable solutions. These comments primarily focus on Chapter 7 of EPA’s report dealing with flowback and produced water.
To begin, we believe the unequivocal conclusion from the report is that hydraulic fracturing contaminates drinking water resources. For instance, looking narrowly at the pollution pathway of spills from flowback and produced water, EPA identified 225 such spills of which 146 reached environmental receptors (soil, surface water, or groundwater). These spills totaled at least 1.6 million liters (422,000 gallons).
